Sevierville, Tenn. ? Frustration with public education seems to be growing among the nation’s Southern Baptists, with supporters of Christian schools and home schooling arguing that if God is absent from the classroom then their children should leave, too.

“What has happened is not so much that the Christians are leaving the public schools as that the public schools have left the Christians,” advocate Ed Gamble said.

Gamble is executive director of the Southern Baptist Association of Christian Schools, an Orlando, Fla.-based group that supports the more than 600 Southern Baptist schools created in the past eight years.

“As the public schools have become increasingly secular and increasingly intolerant of things Christian, people who are openly Christian have said, ‘I guess they are not part of our team anymore,”‘ Gamble said.

The number of conservative Christian schools grew by nearly 11 percent between 1999-2000 and 2001-2002, to 5,527, according to the U.S. Department of Education. At that rate, Christian schools are growing faster than private schools as a whole.

Earlier this year, a resolution proposed at the national meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention — which guides the nation’s largest Protestant denomination — urged parents to withdraw their children from “officially Godless” “government schools” in favor of religious education.